


Stitch by Stitch

by LamiaCalls



Category: The Hoarding (Short Film)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dark Magic, Gen, Horror, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:02:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28556562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LamiaCalls/pseuds/LamiaCalls
Summary: Mary won't leave Hope behind.
Relationships: Mary & Hope (The Hoarding)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Holiday Horror 2020





	Stitch by Stitch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GaleWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GaleWrites/gifts).



Mary wiped the blood from her cheek. But it was no good — there was too much on her hands, the sleeves of her uniform-issue t-shirt. She was just smearing it about at this point.

Her breath was painful, coming hard and fast, and she knew she was trembling but she felt too disconnected from her own body to even really register that.

She had done it. _She had done it._

A blood-splattered dress, with two holes for two heads, lay empty over the mess of baby doll parts. One of the sisters, she had tried to hold the other back, and that had given Mary enough time to…to…

No, she couldn’t even think about it, if she wanted to keep her breakfast down.

But she was safe now. And the house around her, she could almost hear it sighing in relief, to be free of the reign of the two sisters, horrific and claustrophobic and endless.

Mary couldn’t tell if she was crying, or if it was the wetness of blood on her face. She didn’t dare turn to the mirror behind her to check.

 _She could do this_.

She tried to think about what she’d say to the people who’d hired her. How she would even begin to explain what had happened; would anyone believe her? Probably not.

And how would she explain why the job wasn’t done, and where Hope had gone…

Hope…was gone…

Gone…

Torn apart by the sisters…

She took a deep breath.

She needed to fix this, somehow. Especially if she hoped to have another job after this — and hope, she did. She needed to show them she was trustworthy, responsible. That she could get things done regardless of the obstacles placed in front of her. That’s what her resume said, and she wasn’t a liar.

So…

So.

If the sisters had been able to bring themselves back, maybe there was something Mary could do? This was new, a new possibility that she’d never considered before, but knowing dark forces were real, knowing there was something out there — but would she be risking Hope’s sanity? Would Hope be like one of the sisters, twisted and made grotesque? Or was that sister like that even before death? And even if it were true—

Her thoughts were scattered and cacophonous, like a rainmaker being smashed to pieces.

She let her body go on instinct instead, then. She grabbed at Hope’s leg, and pulled the bloody stump from the nest of doll arms, careful not to rip any of the loose skin.

* * *

Many people came to the house in the days following Bryony’s death. It had her house, of course, but Penny had moved in immediately. If she could not share the same spiritual place as her sister, then she would damn well live in the same physical place that she had.

“A tragedy,” Penny heard the mourners whisper to each other.

“She’s in a better place,” is what they said to her.

She said nothing back.

What was there to say? Her sister was gone; Penny’s words with her.

Her uncle stopped by the house most days. He’d come laden with food, though Penny was eating little, and would sit and try to coax words from her.

There was a time when Penny would pretend to care, keep up conversation just so he would feel better about trying to help. But she had no energy for that. Her loyalty lay with memory now, not other people.

“I remember when I lost your dad, Pen,” he was saying, but she didn’t listen to the rest. It was different, she thought. Her father and uncle had been close, but siblings only. Nothing closer than two brothers were expected.

Bryony had been her best friend. And she had been the only one to understand Maria, truly. Others dismissed or worried over her eccentricities. But Penny saw them all for the wonderful mosaic that made Bryony perfect.

“We should clean up,” her uncle said, one late evening when the fire had burned low. “She left a lot of junk here.”

“No!” Penny said. Even she was surprised by the force in her voice. “No, don’t touch anything.”

Her uncle had stepped back, hands up in innocence.

“Alright, Pen,” he said, voice even, faux-calm. She hated it. “I’ll leave it. But…you can’t hold on to it forever.”

Penny just looked up at him, gaze unrelenting, until he shrugged and cast his eyes away.

He stopped coming so often after that.

* * *

Hope had been nice. Mary had thought they might become friends. Before she got to that awful mirror, she had been imagining them getting lunch together from the convenience store down the road. Thought about them finding a clear space and Hope telling her about her life. She had so many questions for her.

Then, as she threw the doll-filled bags down to Mary, Mary had imagined them drinking together. She wondered what kind of drunk she’d be, what kind both of them would be.

“I can do this,” Mary whispered to herself.

Hope’s calf slotted neatly into the sheered off flesh of her thigh, making a wet sucking sound as meat found meat. It was like clicking Lego into place, it fit so perfectly, not a flap of skin out of place — just a sore red line that ringed her.

Maybe that would sort itself though. Maybe when she’d finished putting Hope back together, the seams of skin would disappear.

She stood up. Turned and looked at herself in the mirror. She was covered in blood. But explaining her state to anyone was a long way off in the future. Too far away to even fathom.

No. She could fix this. All of this.

She couldn’t do anything about her matted hair right now — perhaps she’d find the bathroom, and hopefully the water would still work — nor her bloodshot eyes or the fact she looked like someone who had spent the whole day screaming. Tired and exhausted and terrified.

She steeled herself. She’d been through worse.

Actually, that wasn’t true. But she didn’t know how else to calm herself other than to pretend otherwise.

She needed to go downstairs. She needed fresh air. The stench of copper was rich and thick and she couldn’t stand to breath it anymore.

She counted the stairs on her way down, to stop her mind trailing. That was it, she thought: she needed to stay on task. It was the only way to get through it.

Nobody was on the street when she went out, so she slunk round the back of the house and sat on the pile of trash bags. The air was sweet out there, and she could hear cars somewhere. It grounded her, to hear life again.

After maybe ten minutes, or perhaps an hour, she went back up to finish her task, counting the steps on her way.

* * *

Her uncle stopped coming, and so did most of everyone else eventually.

“You have to start moving on,” her aunt had told her on one of her last visits.

“She wouldn’t want you to stop living,” some woman who might have been her cousin or might have been her neighbour said. Or maybe somebody wrote it in one of the heaps of sympathy cards, or on a post-it they’d attached to a meal they left on her front door.

They dropped off slowly at first, one by one not coming to the house, then all at once.

Penny had two modes: catatonic, unable to move her limbs under the heavy sway of grief.

Or pacing, erratic and unable to calm the beating of her heart.

She would go, room to room, switching on and off the lights. She would count the steps up and down from the front door to the attic. Anything to keep her mind at bay.

She pulled Bryony’s things out of the cupboards, and down from the attic.

Bryony had loved dolls. Loved them more than people — except Pen, of course. Some of the dolls, and what Bryony had made of them, were grotesque, and yet Pen loved them just the same.

She took them to the attic and began to smash them, tears streaming, voice hoarse from crying or shouting, she wasn’t sure which. She just need to destroy something. To feel anything but the emptiness inside of her, the gaping maw inside her that she threatened to slide into at any moment, collapsing in on herself like a dying star.

But it was no use.

She couldn’t live without her sister.

She would have to find another way.

* * *

Mary slotted Hope’s arm into her shoulder socket, wrinkling her noise at the squelch it made. She worked methodically, finding each scrap of bone and flesh and bit of body, and piecing them together, bit by bit, stitch by stitch.

Her hands were shaking by the end, and the moon was high in the sky.

“Please work, please work, please work,” was her mantra as she laid down the broken pieces of Hope’s skull.

It took some scrambling, throwing aside doll legs, to find the last piece: Hope’s ear, bloodied but still in tact. It would be miraculous if it weren’t so gross.

Mary squashed it against Hope’s skull, praying and then silently celebrating as it soldered itself there — Mary didn’t want to examine _how_ this was all working. It was working, and that was all that mattered.

Mary crouched down beside Hope. She was still so pretty, even with a face and body slashed by bloody lines. She looked like one of those Japanese teapots that had gold painted along the cracks, or a porcelain doll that had been glued back together.

“Please work, please work, please work,” Mary whispered. She closed her eyes, and tried to summon every scrap of belief that it could work, to channel it to Hope.

“What the fuck happened?”

Mary’s eyes flew open.

Hope’s eyes were squeezed closed, and one hand was moving to her head.

“My head kills,” Hope said, groaning.

“You’re alive!” Mary cried.

Hope opened her eyes then, sat up. She looked down at herself, flipping her arms around, touching her stomach, examining herself in the slant of moonlight coming through the window.

“No shit, I’m alive…” Hope asked. Her voice had a hint of accusatory. “Mary, that thing killed me… How am I alive?”

Mary opened her mouth to explain but nothing came out. “Um, I’m actually not sure.”

Hope got up and stared at herself in the mirror, waving her limbs around, as if testing the stitches to see if they’d fray.

“Wow, this is so not hot.”

Mary felt tears brimming, her chest was tight. She wrapped her arms around Hope.

“Hey, geroff me, I’m checking myself out.” But Hope’s voice was soft, kind, and she gave Mary a quick squeeze of a hug. “You’re crazy, you know that? Seriously, what the hell did you do?”

Mary shrugged. “I don’t really understand it. But I couldn’t leave you here.”

“Well, fuck. Thanks, I guess?”

The silence was pregnant and nipped at Mary’s heels. But what was she meant to say? They were near strangers, and she’d resurrected her — somehow — from the goddamn dead. She didn’t know what the social rules were for this kind of situation.

But Hope broke the silence.

“I could really do with a drink. What about you?”

Mary wanted to say a lot of things. To talk to her about what the hell they’d seen. About what Mary had managed to do. But it didn’t seem like the right time.

“Shouldn’t we sort the house out first?” she said instead.

Hope rolled her eyes. “I just _died_. I think I want a fucking drink before I get back to this place. Come on! Let’s celebrate me becoming…whatever I am. Whatever!”

Mary shifted weight from one foot to the other.

“Okay. But…tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we’ll sort this place out, if it’s _that_ important to you—“

“It is!”

“—But for now, let’s live a little, alright?”

Mary considered this for a moment. “All right.”


End file.
